February 2025 Newsletter (Patreon)

The time has finally come. The time to put some content™️onto the Patreon platform. This content will, in turn, reach subscribers either through Patreon app or website, or - if you're very luck - via some sort of "electronic mail".

I've decided to try to start each month with a round-up post on Patreon. The majority of Indie Game Clinic supporters are likely to be on the Discord already, so you'll probably know most of the following information, but these monthly round-ups should help to ensure that nothing gets lost.One of my goals for 2025 is to start running game jams. But I want to make sure they aren't just copies of Ludum Dare or the GMTK jam, and are focused activities or topics which might help us develop important skills. So, in January I ran a Discord poll to find out what kind of game jams you would all be more interested in taking part in. I intend any Indie Game Clinic game jams to be open, public, and hosted on itch.io, but it seemed like our Discord was the best place to start asking about preferences.The most popular theme was "collab jam" - a game jam which can't be entered solo. That's more of a restriction than a theme, but it was good to see that folks are interested in the idea of making a game with other people. I've seen too much romanticization of the solo gamedev idea on YouTube recently, and it irks me, because I've seen first hand that people generally make better things when they work together. Making your own solo projects is a great way to get a grounding in all of the sub-disciplines of gamedev, and to work out which ones you enjoy doing or find harder, but collaboration is usually a fast-track to higher quality work. The second most popular concept was the "pitch jam". The idea of this would be for everyone involved to make very short - probably only 30 seconds long - pitches for a game. For many of this, this would mean conveying a totally new game idea, using narration, sketches and animatics, or screengrabs from a small prototype. If you're interested in the concept of the 30 second pitch, it might be worth watching The Amnesia Fortnite Movie, which is where I stole it from.

We probably won't start running Game Jams until the second quarter of 2025, but it's been really helpful to speak to you about these plans and see which ideas excite you more or less. For those of you who are new to game dev, and itching to get started on making things in more of a community context, I highly recommend checking out and maybe bookmarking the page at https://indiegamejams.com/ - a fantastic database of all (or most) of the game jams going on at any one time.In podcast-related-news, the Say It Like You Play It podcast - which myself and Ibi do once a month, has moved from the IGC YouTube to its own page, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/@SayItLikeYouPlayIt. It's a podcast about games, language, and culture, and if you are interested in hearing about games and gaming from the perspective of linguistics, cultural studies, or humanities more generally, this can introduce you to some of the concepts. It's quite a lofi production, and we are still experimenting with formats and topics. If you like the podcast, we'd really appreciate a positive review on whichever platform you listen to podcasts on.We're also gearing up to start Game Developer's Library, a book review podcast covering books on game design and related topics. The proposed format is that Doc and a guest host take listeners through the most interesting or games-relevant parts of a book. Some of the books will be very game design specific, others might be generalist design books like The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, and some might be less obvious creative guides like Scott McLeod's Understanding Comics (which, for example, is a must-read when it comes to visual design of cartoon characters - did you know that game characters are often cartoons? Wild). For those of you who are interested in possibly contributing as a co-host, there is a sign-up form here. All you need is a book suggestion, a microphone of a slightly higher quality than a built in laptop mic, confidence speaking, and time to read the book in preparation and make a few notes. Bonus points to anyone who suggests a book which was already on my "I've been meaning to read" list.Thanks to our paid supporters on YouTube and Patreon, we've now got enough of a "proof of concept" to know that this is worth investing more time into. You can expect an episode of Indies Under the Knife every Thursday.That's probably enough for one newsletter! Thank you for reading, and for all of your support so far.